Finished Shelby Foote's excellent The Civil War: A Narrative - Fort Sumter to Perryville. Thank you randomwalk for the inspiration.

Before I move on to volume 2, Fredericksburg to Meridian, it's time to hit that thickening pile of New Yorker magazines that was put aside. And, my thoughts also are to start Annette Thau's The Bond Book, that was so highly recommended in a previous BH thread.

NYBoglehead wrote:"The Debt Bomb" by Senator Tom Coburn - another one that will make you cringe

I think you should spend some time with the alternative views. Krugman's latest would give you a taste.

Also recently finished "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis, another example of why low-cost passive investing will beat the active management from the $3000 suit wearing Ivy League alum in "high finance"

Although The Big Short says the exact opposite. A group of truly clever men (Eisman, Bury etc.) analyzed what was going on and made a lot of money for themselves and their clients by betting against the market-- using publicly available (albeit obscure) information.

So TBS is more a demonstration of the problems of, and the rewards of, going against the crowd.

It also raises the question of whether all these goings on are to the public benefit. Boomerang, his next book, by going to the likes of Iceland and Ireland, raises that question more fundamentally.

It's not a demonstration of market efficiency-- in fact it's almost a violation of it and an argument for behavioural investing and finance. Except in the sense as individual investors we are unlikely to have the knowledge, tools and sheer guts to pull it off.

On that latter point I would agree with you about the merits of indexation.

Last edited by Valuethinker on Mon Jun 11, 2012 12:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Before I move on to volume 2, Fredericksburg to Meridian, it's time to hit that thickening pile of New Yorker magazines that was put aside. And, my thoughts also are to start Annette Thau's The Bond Book, that was so highly recommended in a previous BH thread.

Cheers

I am more fond of James MacPherson 'Battle Cry of Freedom' which seems more of a historians' book-- informed by current debate. I don't deny Foote's narrative power.

MacPherson is usually thought to be more pro Union and Foote more pro Confederate.

I have John Keegan's The Civil War. Keegan is an accomplished military historian, and he has lived in North America, taught at US military schools (Fort Levenworth, Kansas?). The book incorporates geographic and strategic perspectives very well, if it is not as gripping as a narrative.

This is my first reading of a Caro book. It is a well documented biography of Lyndon Johnson's life from about 1955 thru 1964. He begins the book as the "second most powerful man in Washington", a real deal maker as Senate Majority Leader ("Mr. Leader"), loses the nomination to John Kennedy for the 1960 Democratic Presidental hopeful and is then the Vice President in the Kennedy administration.

Two very interesting points are the process which led to him being asked to be the VP nominee (and then the 3 trips in one day by Robert Kennedy asking him to withdraw from the VP nomination) and the complete loathing and ridicule from the Kennedy administration during his tenure as VP.

Not only is this a great insite into the life of Mr. Johnson, but also into the inner workings of the Kennedy Administration and the hatred between Robert Kennedy and Johnson. They truly hated each other.

Right now I am at the summer of 1963 and the Civil Rights issues are front and center. I never realized Johnson's commitment to that issue. He had to walk a fine line between being a "southern Senator" and his feelings about human/civil rights.

This is a fascinating book.

Ed

The Caro book is on my library list and your comments make me anxious to get started. Being a member of the '60s generation, I well recall Johnson's battles for civil rights and how unlikely it seemed that he would be the one to lead to enactment of the Civil Rights Act. But it was fitting for the '60s, about which everything seemed unlikely.

I have never really gotten to the bottom of what Johnson, a bully and a cruel and belittling man, what was genuine concern for the less fortunate and what was pure political opportunism. But he understood perfectly that the New Deal alliance: working class Catholics, northern liberals, blacks, Southern Whites would be torn asunder by what he was doing, and the great Southern Realignment would follow. Yet he did it anyhow.

Perhaps, like Churchill, you just have to take the bad with the good with LBJ. The hour came and so then did the man.

He so absolutely lacking redeeming personal virtues of the conventional 'character' kind. Yet he was probably the most parliamentary of all American presidents and one of its greatest parliamentarians before that. We do not revere him, yet he achieved more than any other postwar president in that spectrum.

Had he only had a deeper scepticism, as Eisenhower and Kennedy had had before him (JFK arguably less so) of the rosy hues of the can-do military and diplomatic minds advising their political masters and of the nature of what was going on in Indochina, a bit more political courage... then he would be remembered as one of America's greatest presidents.

No American president in the 20th century other than FDR ever did so much for black Americans. (oddly Richard Nixon had some notable accomplishments too, I believe). Maybe we'd give number 3 to Harry S Truman (for desegregating the Army. Which gave us Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice under president Bush, which historians will remember him for. And then on...).

Last edited by Valuethinker on Mon Jun 11, 2012 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Before I move on to volume 2, Fredericksburg to Meridian, it's time to hit that thickening pile of New Yorker magazines that was put aside. And, my thoughts also are to start Annette Thau's The Bond Book, that was so highly recommended in a previous BH thread.

Cheers

... James MacPherson 'Battle Cry of Freedom' which seems more of a historians' book ...

Yes, James McPherson was a Princeton history professor; Shelby Foote self-identified as a novelist.

Valuethinker wrote:MacPherson is usually thought to be more pro Union and Foote more pro Confederate.

Foote concludes the Bibliographical Note in vol. 1, The Civil War rather charmingly:

One word more perhaps will not be out of place. I am a Mississippian. Though the veterans I knew are all dead now, down to the final home guard drummer boy of my childhood, the remembrance of them is still with me. However, being nearly as far removed from them in time as most of them were removed from combat when they died, I hope I have recovered the respect they had for their opponents until Reconstruction lessened and finally killed it. Biased is the last thing I would be; I yield to no one in my admiration for heroism and ability, no matter which side of the line a man was born or fought on when the war broke out, fourscore and seventeen years ago. If pride in the resistance my forebears made against the odds has leaned me to any degree in their direction, I hope it will be seen to amount to no more, in the end, than the average American's normal sympathy for the underdog in a fight.

I've been reading How We Do Harm by Otis Brawley, M.D. Dr. Brawley points out that the poor sometimes don't get the medical care that they need while the rich sometimes get too many tests and interventions that are actually harmful. It's a good read becuase it makes you aware that doctors can actually do more harm than good in certain cases.

American Notes by Rudyard Kipling (yes, Kipling, not Dickens). Available from Project Gutenberg here and as a free Kindle book. Very interesting! His tone of voice is very modern, colloquial, and snarky. The publisher's introduction says "These 'Notes'" aroused much protest and severe criticism when they appeared in 1891, and are considered so far beneath Mr. Kipling's real work that they have been nearly suppressed and are rarely found in a list of his writings. Their very caustic style is of interest to a student and lover of Kipling..."

The sort of "booster" profiled in Sinclair Lewis' "Babbitt" was well in evidence. Something I'd only gradually picked up on--Buffalo was once considered the equal or superior of Chicago--is clear. Some casual references to how Buffalo was changing as the railroad started to compete with the canal and lake traffic.

I start to see glimpses of how sensible and real the concept of "progress" must have seemed in 1890's America, contemptuous as Kipling is about it. I thought this was interesting. I read it as the reality of a middle class in the United States that probably had no counterpart in England.

When you have seen the outside of a few hundred thousand of these homes and the insides of a few score, you begin to understand why the American (the respectable one) does not take a deep interest in what they call "politics," and why he is so vaguely and generally proud of the country that enables him to be so comfortable. How can the owner of a dainty chalet, with smoked-oak furniture, imitation Venetian tapestry curtains, hot and cold water laid on, a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks, a baby crawling down the veranda, and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose gently hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk of an August evening—how can such a man despair of the Republic?"

In the last chapter, he caustically criticizes what he sees as the United States' laughably inadequate naval defenses of its shores. Hard to know whether he was right, as fortunately it was not tested.

Behold now the glorious condition of this Republic which has no fear. There is ransom and loot past the counting of man on her seaboard alone—plunder that would enrich a nation—and she has neither a navy nor half a dozen first-class ports to guard the whole. No man catches a snake by the tail, because the creature will sting; but you can build a fire around a snake that will make it squirm.

The country is supposed to be building a navy now. When the ships are completed her alliance will be worth having—if the alliance of any republic can be relied upon. For the next three years she can be hurt, and badly hurt.

Currently reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. I so much enjoyed the video of his Sackler lecture linked from the BH site and also Victoria's positive comments that I decided to pick it up at our village library.

At the same time I'm moving, ever so slowly, through Thau's The Bond Book, 3rd ed. Not that it isn't very good, but just a bit dry shall we say. Like a good martini

A biography of Che Guevara. Why? Have spent some time in Mexico, where he is revered. But that's there. I'm here, and less than 10 percent into the book, the term sociopath comes to mind. I'll forge on, since I'm learning some about the history of U.S. governmental and corporate shenanigans in Latin America, and because the author lacks a discernible political agenda and is therefore credible. But as for Comandante Guevara, I'm squarely in the camp that believes that nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.

RebusCannébus wrote:A biography of Che Guevara. Why? Have spent some time in Mexico, where he is revered. But that's there. I'm here, and less than 10 percent into the book, the term sociopath comes to mind. I'll forge on, since I'm learning some about the history of U.S. governmental and corporate shenanigans in Latin America, and because the author lacks a discernible political agenda and is therefore credible. But as for Comandante Guevara, I'm squarely in the camp that believes that nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.

Our personalities are sometimes quite independent of our ideologies particularly if we tend to absolutist or extremist views.

on both the extreme left and right, you find people who believe the means justify the ends, that doing things to people for the good of the people is OK even if individuals suffer that you 'cannot get an omlette without breaking eggs'. Tyrannical and violent acts are justified by good ends. Either (right wing) by the creation of the moral and racially pure society or (left wing) by achieving revolutionary equality, hanging the capitalists etc.

in the case of Guevara, as well as Leon Trotsky (who was murdered by Stalin in Mexico) you get the sense of the permanent revolutionary, who thrived on the chaos and danger of revolution. They would never settle.

But 'the Revolution always eats its young'. This happened in Iran, too, after 1979. Or famously in France (the Thermidorean Reaction) after the rule of the Committee on Public Safety.

In every revolution there is always a post Revolution consolidation period, when people like Guevera and Trotsky, who were essential to making it happen and defeating the Revolution's external opponents, become dangerous to the Revolution. They want to continue the internal upheaval, when what is needed is stability and consolidation, and they want to carry on the Revolution externally, when that action would threaten the Revolution.

So Castro more or less deported Guevera (after letting him run his concentration camp system for a while, which is usually glossed over in the Guevera hagiography that passes for biography) to cause trouble somewhere else. Stalin did the same in a power struggle with Trotsky, the latter having won the Russian Civil War against domestic and foreign powers. Stalin being a devious old paranoid then had Trotsky assassinated. The US did Castro's work for him with Che.

At some level, all Revolutions have their Lenin, their Trotsky and their Stalin. The Stalin pretty much always winds up in charge (arguably Castro was both Lenin and Stalin, Ho Chi Minh the same). In the English Revolution, that was Cromwell who eventually crushed the more radical parts of the Revolution-- the Levellers, the 5th Monarchy men etc. Having won the war, the New Model Army then became the instrument of repression.

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. 1/4 of the way through, hard to say whether I'll finish it. Combination of genuine enjoyment, dutiful self-improvement, and a wish to break in my new Kindle on free material. As always, it's a mix: some really good descriptions, some much-too-good descriptions (virtuoso showing off), some genuinely enjoyable characters (Mrs. Jellyby), and some that leave me cold (Harold Skimpole). And the unexpected passage that suddenly moves me to tears, or at least moistens my eye:

"Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home and did cleaning and nursing and washing for a long time before I began to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?"

"And do you often go out?"

"As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes and smiling, "because of earning sixpences and shillings!"

"And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?"

"To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play you know, and Tom an't afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?"

"No-o!" said Tom stoutly.

"When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright—almost quite bright. Don't they, Tom?"

I remember a similar 'breath of fresh air' in reading Heinlein (true teenage intellectuals would have read Nietsche, who said much the same things).

Of course adulthood is finding out about how very much more complex and interdependent the world is. I think there is still valuable stuff in Heinlein (the juveniles, I can pretty much dispense with anything written post 1965 or so) but it's that same crashing feeling of discovering the world is not as you would like it.

Tobias Wolfe 'About a Boy' has a devastating visit by the personage to his private school.

I remember a similar 'breath of fresh air' in reading Heinlein (true teenage intellectuals would have read Nietsche, who said much the same things).

Of course adulthood is finding out about how very much more complex and interdependent the world is. I think there is still valuable stuff in Heinlein (the juveniles, I can pretty much dispense with anything written post 1965 or so) but it's that same crashing feeling of discovering the world is not as you would like it.

Tobias Wolfe 'About a Boy' has a devastating visit by the personage to his private school.

Twin Pillars to Desert Storm: America's Flawed Vision in the Middle East from Nixon to Bush by Howard Teicher and Gayle Radley Teicher.

Howard Teicher worked at the Departments of State and Defense under Presidents Carter and Reagan and served on the staff of the National Security Council from 1982 to 1987. Gayle Radley Teicher joined the Office of the Legal Advisor at the Department of State in 1984. While there, she worked on numerous international legal issues, including a nation's right to use force and American counterterrorism policy. She is also the author of a study of covert actions.

gkaplan wrote:Twin Pillars to Desert Storm: America's Flawed Vision in the Middle East from Nixon to Bush by Howard Teicher and Gayle Radley Teicher.

Howard Teicher worked at the Departments of State and Defense under Presidents Carter and Reagan and served on the staff of the National Security Council from 1982 to 1987. Gayle Radley Teicher joined the Office of the Legal Advisor at the Department of State in 1984. While there, she worked on numerous international legal issues, including a nation's right to use force and American counterterrorism policy. She is also the author of a study of covert actions.

Just when you think things will not get any worse for poor old Jurgis, they do. Might never eat sausage again.I liked the writing style...you could actually experience the smells of the slaughter houses and feel the frigid cold of a Chicago winter.

I just finished Rudyard Kipling's AMERICAN NOTES, which is free from Kindle, and enjoyed it just so-so, well enough, but no more. This was Kipling's first trip to the U.S. (1891), and he hadn't read up on the country or the cities he would visit - San Francisco, Chicago, Buffalo, and a couple of others - and he really didn't know, to be blunt, just exactly what he was seeing, so fell back on the cliches of the day, some yet obtaining, of American culture and the lack thereof. While unflattering, the Notes don't rise to the poison pen level.

They were never polished, and the editor explains that they've been out of print many years, and are seldom listed in bibliographies, largely because of Kipling's negativism. He later moderated his views, married a New Englander, and built a nice home in Vermont.

Had he just a pinch of Mark Twain's humor, he could have penned a hilarious story about being hit up for a game of poker by a card shark in San Francisco.

Just finished Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child (Reacher). This was my second Reacher book read and this was excellent. Picked up 2 more at garage sales and will read them soon.

Now it is "A Dance at the Slaughterhouse" by Lawrence Block.

Valuethinker...regarding President Johnson's motivation regarding civil rights, etc, Caro makes considerable reference to Johnson's growing up very poor and basically being an "outsider" to priviledge. He was negetively influenced by his father's failure at ranching and having once been a Texas state senator and then being disgraced by economic failure.

"The Passage of Power" is a powerful book. While I will not read the previous books on Johnson in Caro's series, the next book will be read. That will deal with Vietnam and the dark days of the 1960's.

What a complex man...but he sure accomplished alot in a short period of time in late 1963 and 1964.

After reading Caro, I needed a break and went with two easy mysteries.